GNOME Shell 2.29 Brings A Lot Of Improvements

[BlackStar]

...

Hey, you are preaching to the choir.

One point, though: native look & feel is not overrated. While it starts with trivial apperance (e.g. firefox menus not fading out on win32) it goes all the way down to e.g. keyring integration for storing passwords, keyboard navigation, accessibility... Proper integration is *hard* and cannot be really achieved with toolkits such as Qt or wxWidgets. Needless to say, not many applications manage that.

As far as I am concerned, integration should not be broken unless there is a very, very good reason. For example, Chromium breaks the typical browser layout, but in return becomes much more usable on tiny 600px screens - they trade-off is worth it. MS Office 2007 broke the traditional menu paradigm, because it was not well suited to its thousand-something menus - the result is worth it. Firefox breaks several paradigms (e.g. wheel scroll on tabs, fading menus, menu shadows) but these breaks don't give something back in return - bad trade-off (but the rest of the package makes up for it).

[Joe Sixpack]

Just look at Amarok. The only thing it does not is PLAY MUSIC! An application should do whats advertised and no more. A music player for example should play music and it should do so with ease. A playlist is the only real feature it really needs, anything and everything else should be hidden by default or selectable as a plug-in.

Agreed. Which is exactly why Banshee sucks. No sorting by genre?

[Joe Sixpack]

As long as you don't explain the real purpose of "plasma" and what is it for, it's worth nothing.
What does it bring for me as a user that I won't be able to do with Gnome ?

That is the most ass backwards argument I've ever heard.

You're actually taking an existing product and asking what can it do compared to an unreleased product that'll be almost 3 years behind the original. Seriously? Since when does the originator have to prove anything to the imitator, especially when the originator is 2 years in the game and the imitator is still unreleased.

You'd rather miss out on features and wait for the GNOME version than use KDE. Damn you are a fanboy to the core.

[monraaf]

This is just sad, another GNOME thread ruined by KDE fundamentalists. Why can't you guys just play with your plasmids and dolphins and be happy?

[curaga]

Why is the looks of an app such an issue? I couldn't give a damn if a gtk+ app looks different than a qt one. It's part of the "difference is richness" paradigm, would be boring and pointless if everything looked the same.

[BlackStar]

Why is the looks of an app such an issue? I couldn't give a damn if a gtk+ app looks different than a qt one. It's part of the "difference is richness" paradigm, would be boring and pointless if everything looked the same.

Imagine if every application decided to use its own OK/CANCEL or CANCEL/OK order, its own menu layout (where do you find settings, is it under the file, preferences or tools menu?) and used different background/foreground colors. Total madness.

There are many ways to differentiate applications without making the user's desktop look like a circus.

[BlackStar]

More on topic, I ran Gnome Shell for 1 hour as a test drive. It's not ready. I'd go as far as say it is unusable in its current form. Fortunately, there's still a lot of time until October.

Impressions:
- Mutter is significantly slower than Compiz on my Quadro NVS 135M.
- The "activities" paradigm is very nice, but the constant zoom-in/-out effect makes it unusable. It should simply bring up an overlay at the left side of the screen instead.
- It seems stable. No crashes for the duration of my test.
- The theme has too low contrast and not enough visual feedback (e.g. it needs highlights on hover and click).
- The desktop spaces control scheme is not discoverable enough.
- It needs larger targets for clicking. This is a beef I also have with KDE and Gnome 2.x: don't give me 8x8 or 16x16 targets to click. Take a cue from Win7 and Mac OS X and give me large, clear, 48x48 icons at the very least.
- It does not follow my system-wide font preferences.
- The launcher application (Alt-F2) should be replaced by Gnome-Do. Seriously.
- Also, please provide a way to parametrize and/or clear the "recent documents" data, kthxbye.

I'm back to Compiz + Gnome-Do + AWN for now, but I'll be keeping an eye out for Gnome Shell over the coming months. The concept is great and has the potential to make my normal interaction with the computer faster. The implementation is still rough, but it's steadily getting better (nice bonus: the JS scripts under /usr/share/gnome-shell are trivially easy to hack!)

In any case, gnome-shell is not nearly as bad as some people are saying here. It needs work, but it is already usable.

[Joe Sixpack]

First

I ran Gnome Shell for 1 hour as a test drive. It's not ready. I'd go as far as say it is unusable in its current form.

Then

It needs work, but it is already usable.

[L33F3R]

lol joe, i was thinking the exact same thing.

[BlackStar]

Yeah, that was a pretty bad choice of words

But then again, I'm nothing if not a man of contradictions.

What I meant to say:
- unusable in that you don't want to run this as your primary WM in its current form. Unless you enjoy repeated epileptic episodes from zooming in and out every 20 seconds, I guess.
- usable in that it doesn't crash and features work as advertised (which is no small deal).

If the final release looks like this, it's going to suck. Completely. However, they have ~8 months to fix the usability issues and make it rock. The foundation is there, they just need to spice it up to release quality.